From Schmigadoon!, at the Nederlander.
Photo: Matthew Murphy
In an unsteady season on Broadway, we’ve gotten a surefire frontrunner for the award for “most musical.” Not in terms of the scale of its sets—we’ll leave that to the giant staircase in The Queen of Versailles, or whatever is going on with the flying vampires of The Lost Boys—but in terms of the most tropes crammed into one two-act stretch. If you respond to musical theater like a professor with a grading rubric, I can’t imagine you’d find fault with Schmigadoon! The show’s got love songs, patter songs, a few reprises, a soliloquy, and production numbers with hooky choruses guaranteed to stick in your head. There’s a big ensemble, elaborate costumes, a book that winks at every Rodgers and Hammerstein inconsistency that has ever bothered you, and, briefly, a dream ballet. It’s exuberant, clever, eager to please, dexterously devised, and yet, with all that technique behind it, it lands in a place that’s awfully unambitious. Why does a love letter to the classic musical make the project of musical theater feel so damn small?
The easy explanation may be that Schmigadoon! started out on television, which is not known to be the most auspicious launching pad for a stage project. But its sturdy structure ought to be enough to get it across that divide. The series version of Schmigadoon! premiered on AppleTV+ in the summer of 2021, while Broadway’s stages were still dark, offering an indulgent, bedazzled portal into a big old musical for viewers at home. Onscreen, Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key play a couple of contemporary doctors who, in the middle of bickering during a camping trip, stumble into a River City fantasia of a town that’s stuck in its own mishmash of Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Brigadoon and other shows that high-school drama teachers have licensed for decades. (And, because so many theater actors were available mid-pandemic, the town had about as many Tony Awards per capita as The Gilded Age.) Strong and Key’s characters, Josh and Melissa, have opposite responses to the nonsense unfolding before them—she loves musicals; he can’t stand them—but neither can escape until, in a tried and true comedy-of-remarriage format, they work through the flaws in their relationship. On TV, and especially in the first season that’s adapted here, Schmigadoon!’s relentless inside-joke escapism was part of its charm, as was creator and songwriter Cinco Paul’s ability to gene-splice so many classic tunes into new mutant progeny. (Paul created the series with Ken Daurio; he’s the sole author of the stage version.) Paul gets away with the Wells Fargo–clambake nonsense of a song like “Corn Puddin’” in large part because he has a fine ear for the pleasures of classical forms and also knows where to bend them. Note the syncopated cascading scansion of “You put the corn in the puddin’ / And the puddin’ in the bowl / You put the bowl in your belly ‘/ Cause it’s good for the soul!” Or, in a song by the town’s resident scallywag, you can delight in how Paul pulls off a rhyme of “El Paso,” “lasso,” and then the notion that he ditched a girl and “put on the gas / oh!” (“Coercin’ a bull” enthusiasts, take note.) The writing provides the same dorky, satisfying “aha!” you get from solving a crossword puzzle. Just like Melissa, who’s watching and listening in that moment, you giggle and kick your legs.
With that craftsmanship on view, you can imagine it’d be natural—and cost-efficient, given you already have proof of concept—step to bring Schmigadoon! home to the theater. Lorne Michaels, a producer of the series and now the Broadway run, certainly thought so. And yes, it’s immediately fun to see the big numbers, directed and choreographed by Christopher Gatelli, land on a proper stage. (Gatelli won an Emmy for choreographing the series and also helmed the special effects campfest that is Death Becomes Her; in my favorite of many throwback gestures he deploys here, he has the curtain rise just to the knees before the big curtain call so we focus on just the dancers’ legs.) But despite an out-of-town tryout in D.C., the transition from theater-for-TV to theater-for-theater hasn’t, at this point, been smoothed over.
There are plenty of televisionisms that rankle, even within Schmigadoon!’s largely retro construction. It’s glutted with supporting characters, and the plot still eddies through a series of clearly episodic incidents. Watching TV, with a remote in hand, we’re happy to be picaresque for 30 minutes at a time. Sitting in a theater for roughly five times as long, aware of our bladders and lower backs, we need more momentum. Josh and Melissa, in trying to escape the town, look for new love in two pairs of potential romantic partners. He tries things out with an Ado Annie–esque ingénue (McKenzie Kurtz, testing whether it’s possible to deliver a whole performance with her mouth open in, variously, surprise, delight, and confusion) and then a buttoned-up schoolmarm (Isabelle McCalla, typically and pleasingly understated). She has a dalliance with the local bad-boy carny (Max Clayton, buff as hell) and a doctor who reminds you of mid-century musicals’ fondness for daddies whose names have nobiliary particles, as in von Trapp and de Becque (played by Ivan Hernandez, giving Broadway some welcome low-register sonority in 2026). If that’s not enough plot, Josh and Melissa also get entangled with the romantic and occasionally electoral business of the mayor (Brad Oscar) and his scheming, xenophobic wife (Ana Gasteyer, who lays into the show’s crowd-pleasing “Ya Got Trouble” variant), as well as the reverend (Maulik Pancholy) and his wife (Ann Harada, the one actor to reprise a role from television—she still really knows how to land vacuity as a punchline). Oscar and Pancholy are secretly gay and in love with each other, but this subplot built in acknowledgment of queer-coded characters of the past never crosses the line from “pointing something out” to “having an insight.” That dynamic pops up in much of Paul’s dialogue, which has a Saturday Night Live habit of mistaking pop-culture references in the shape of jokes for actual humor. (This tendency also plagues Titaníque.) If you laugh at Josh’s gripe that this town is like “if The Walking Dead was also Glee,” it’s more because you know what both those things are than because it’s actually funny.
That Josh is even aware of Glee, even if that fact is lampshaded in Melissa’s next line, gets at a fuzziness of both their characters. Who are Josh and Melissa, other than our vehicles into this kooky town? Schmigadoon! gives them a generic backstory, one that’s deftly effected onstage by Gatelli—we see them meet over a broken vending machine that suddenly falls to transform into the bed where they first hook up. She replaces his favorite basketball player’s jersey with a Singin’ in the Rain poster, and as their other friends get married, he drags his feet on a proposal. It’s all quite generic, understandably so—and it’s really hard to write and play people who are supposed to be “normal.” Onscreen, Schmigadoon! Key and especially Strong could convey depth and emotion, subtlety, and often weirdness via their small choices and close ups, defining their characters in opposition to the town’s broad-for-the-sake-of-comedy denizens. Onstage, Alex Brightman and Sara Chase, both gifted theater veterans, are more at sea. They don’t have the recourse of seeming like two ordinary people right alongside theater actors who are telegraphing big emotions so their performances are legible in the balcony, in large part because now they’re also theater actors who have to do just that. Also, as much as Brightman is an innately winning presence, the show has lost the innate friction that came with having a Black man react skeptically to the “simpler times” nostalgia that may factor into his white partner’s affection for musicals, so the character tends to read as simply sour, a dude who doesn’t get it. And in the case of Melissa, the show is still searching to define why exactly she loves musicals. We get gestures at all the romance and fantasy of them all, but oddly never a full-throated, Technicolor ode to her favorite genre. Melissa realizes early on that she can sing, but she does so first only for a brief duet with that carny. In a show with so much homage, it’d be nice to scrounge together a richer “I Want” song.
That may require a firmer definition of what Schmigadoon! itself loves about musicals, and a sense of why we should care too. Paul and Gatelli have nailed the frivolity and escapism of musical theater, but they avoid the bolder, braver, messier, and more durable aspects of the genre’s history. Sure, Rodgers and Hammerstein are faux rustics, and maybe Winthrop is really Marian’s son, and remember how Billy Bigelow implies that “steal it” and “take it” are two different things, and didn’t the baroness always seem like she was a Nazi? Take a ticket and get in line to make the next viral post in r/Broadway. These are observations that amount to light chipping away at a marble edifice that was built with other things in mind. Oklahoma! sure is corny, but Oklahoma! was also always about the cruelty of western expansion. (I’m mad about the film Blue Moon’s elision of this too.) The sincerity of Carousel’s flower-petal romance may seem out of step with social-media dating, but it has plenty to say about labor, class, and violence, in ways that are, yes, deeply uncomfortable but deserve to be reckoned with on real terms. Thematic ambition, a sense of the something to be expressed beyond a central romance, rivalry, or farce, propels modern musical hits too, as in Hairspray, or Wicked, or (no duh) Hamilton.
Schmigadoon! replicates much of the golden-age façade while seeming afraid of those shows’ political shadows. The show gestures at the classic targets of old-timey sexism, small-mindedness, and nativism—much of it embodied by Gasteyer’s scheming character—but only in the safest possible ways. Its aims instead are centered squarely on the importance of Josh and Melissa’s romance, the value in getting one partner to open up for another. I left the theater amused, but with a nagging feeling I’ve kept experiencing recently—that of loving an incredible shrinking genre. We’ve had a stirring season of musical revivals, like Ragtime and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, that speak to the form’s ability to wrap substance in the cloak of spectacle. Yet, increasingly since the pandemic closures, we seem to support and bring forward very few new works with that same heft—and when we do, they don’t last. Maybe producers are listening to the Joshes of the world, or maybe they have turned Broadway into a place that focuses almost entirely on pleasing Melissas, who, they imagine, want the brightly colored surfaces of “musical theater” without its complications and its depth. Top-heavy, familiarity-based productions send the message to ticket buyers that they should come to a musical only for a cuddle and an ooh. But diversion is a thin lane for new work to occupy, and as it seems now, rarely a profitable one (not that anything is). Maybe a lot of producers are Melissas, afraid of the present, looking toward a past that never really existed. To sell a thing, as Willson’s salesmen observed in The Music Man, you’ve got to know the territory of the people buying.
Schmigadoon! is at the Nederlander Theatre.
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